The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

“Did you ask her about it?”

“Once.” Mom turned her cup around in her hands. “She cried. She said her truck was a week from getting picked up, and the man had already called her at work, and she needed it to get to the drive-in. She said she’d pay it back by the end of July.”

“And then?”

“And then she didn’t,” Mom said simply. “And I didn’t ask again. And she hasn’t come in the house much since. She waves from the truck.”

That was the part that sat in my stomach like a stone. My sister drove past our mother’s house every single day in that truck, and waved, and kept on going.

“Mom,” I said. “Are you hungry right now? Honest.”

She didn’t answer, and that was the answer.

“Go put your good blouse on,” I said. “We’re going to Ottumwa.”

It is a little over half an hour from our town to Ottumwa, down the highway past the soybean stubble and the river bottom, and the sun was high and clear the whole way.

She wore her good white blouse under the coral cardigan, and she’d pinned her silver curls back quick in the bathroom mirror. She sat in the passenger seat of my pickup with her purse on her lap, holding it with both hands.

“I didn’t make an appointment,” I told her. “I’m going to walk in and ask nicely.”

“They won’t see me without an appointment.”

“Then we’ll sit there till they do.”

The office is in a low brick building on the north end of town, with a gravel lot and a bench out front. Inside it smelled like coffee and that clean dentist smell.

The woman at the desk was the one I’d talked to. I could tell by her voice. She was maybe sixty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and when I said our name she looked up quick.

“You’re the daughter who called,” she said. Then she looked past me at Mom, standing by the coat rack with her hand over her mouth, and her whole face changed.

“You sit right down, Mrs. Vrba,” she said. “Let me go talk to the doctor.”

Dr. Kettler came out himself about ten minutes later. He is sixty-three, tall and a little stooped, with big gentle hands and a farm cap he’d forgotten to take off when he came in that morning.

He sat down in the waiting room chair next to Mom instead of making her come back right away. I liked him for that before he said a word.

“Mrs. Vrba,” he said. “I hear you’ve been waiting on me a while.”

Mom started to cry. Not loud. She just sat there with tears running down and her hand over her mouth, and she said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. We meant to come.”

I knew she wasn’t crying from fear of the chair. She was crying from shame, and none of it was hers to carry.

“Don’t be hard on her,” she whispered to me while Dr. Kettler went to get his things. “Her truck was about to go back. She was scared.”

“I know, Mom,” I said. And I did know. That was the worst part. I knew exactly why Kenna did it, and it still didn’t make a lick of difference.

Dr. Kettler took her back and had her open up. He looked a long time, pressing gently along her gums with one finger, nodding to himself.